Morning Brief — February 25, 2014

Today’s Morning Brief is brought to you by The Canadian Life and Health Insurance Association. Current government programs only cover half of the costs of long-term care, and most Canadians admit they have no financial plan to cover the gap. Action is needed now. For more information, visit clhia.ca.

The Olympic flame may be out, but the flame wars are just beginning back on Parliament Hill. Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, or so that’s what the Conservatives and NDP would like Canadian voters to believe about Justin Trudeau. Only hours after presiding over the largely successful Liberal policy convention over the weekend, Trudeau went on the popular and influential Tout le Monde en Parle TV talk show. All was going swimmingly until he made light of Vladimir Putin’s bad mood and what it could mean for Ukraine. Here is the official transcript. You be the judge:

Dominique Arel : Then, there are those tragic murderous events that took place in Ukraine this week. Do you think that the policy of the Conservative Canadian Government is appropriate, and do you think Canada could do more?

Justin Trudeau: Canada should do more. For several weeks, we have been trying to encourage the Government to take the leadership to impose personal sanctions against the President and his allies. I think President Yanukovych is now illegitimate, and it is even more worrying now that Russia lost in hockey and will be in a bad mood. We fear some involvement of the Russian government in Ukraine.

Guy A. Lepage: Just because of hockey?

Justin Trudeau: No, I was just trying to bring a bit of humour in a situation that is extremely serious and extremely troubling.

The Harper government wants to keep its sweeping democratic reforms from seeing the light outside of Ottawa, opposition parties are charging. The Conservatives are scotching any effort to have the the committee studying the Fair Elections Act meet anywhere other than Ottawa. They’ll hold extended sessions to hear from citizens, but they’ll have to come to Ottawa to be heard. NDP leader Tom Mulcair made clear he doesn’t think much of the decision: “We’re talking about the rules for a federal general election. That’s the foundation of our democracy. That’s what they’re trying to cheat on,” he said in Question Period. After being cautioned by Speaker Andrew Scheer, he reiterated: ““I can affirm that we all know they’re trying to cheat in advance.”

Nouriel Roubini, the New York University economist heralded as having been the first to predict the U.S. housing slump would trigger a recession, has some advice for Bank of Canada Governor Stephen Poloz — weaken the loonie now. “I would use more aggressive monetary policy to weaken the currency,” Roubini told a Toronto audience. It didn’t work. The loonie climbed .4 of a cent yesterday. “It may not be conventional wisdom right now but I’d say keeping your currency weaker right now is important.”

Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair has a powerful enemy in Mayor Rob Ford’s big brother. Doug Ford, a soon-to-be-retiring city councillor, is calling for an investigation into Blair’s conduct — both for a fishing trip that Blair allegedly took with Police Services Board member Andy Pringle, and for Blair’s comments at the press conference on Halloween when he said the Toronto Police had possession of a sought-after video showing Rob Ford getting high.

This won’t affect most government workers, at least not their desktops at work, but Apple is desperately building a security patch to close a gaping hole in its newest operating software. “It’s as bad as you could imagine, that’s all I can say,” said Johns Hopkins University cryptography professor Matthew Green.

Gov. Gen. David Johnston travels to India through to March 2. He meets with heads of state, senior government officials, business leaders and civil society, with a view to strengthening bilateral relations including commercial and educational ties.

The Charbonneau Commission looking into corruption in Quebec’s construction industry continues its hearings in Montreal.

Statistics Canada releases the quarterly financial statistics for enterprises for the fourth-quarter of 2013, survey of financial security, 2012 and manufacturing at a glance: 2013 in review.

With the Taliban leaders all tucked in their villages in the mountains of Pakistan for the winter, they have become easy picking for the Pakistani air force, which is dropping bombs at an alarming rate. The strikes, carried out by fighter jets, targeted “terrorist hideouts”, a security source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told Al Jazeera.

Move over billionaire Koch brothers, there’s a new brother act looking to take on politics in the U.S. — the Steyers, also billionaires Jim and Tom Steyer plan to use at least $100 million to fund candidates who support efforts to reduce carbon emissions and slow climate change. “You don’t bring a squirt gun to a fight where the other guys have AK-47s,” Jim told Politico. “I will tell you this: We’re fearless.”

In Featured Opinion this morning:

The numbers in Jim Flaherty’s latest fiscal plan are not engraved in stone and — according to our iPolitics fiscal analysts, Scott Clark and Peter DeVries — there’s still a lot that can go wrong with the minister’s deficit elimination calendar.

Thanks to a United Nations report, the world now knows — in sickening detail — how the North Korean regime has turned a nation of 25 million into a vast death camp. Derek Burney and Fen Hampson ask the obvious question: What, if anything, is the world going to do about it?

From our friends at The Tyee, a thoughtful piece by Crawford Killian on former Mexican president Vicente Fox’s recent call for the decriminalization of all outlawed recreational drugs. At best, Killian argues, such a scheme would amount to harm-reduction on a large scale — a desperate attempt by governments to stem the violence of drug wars, while padding their own revenue.

Finally, Bloomberg’s Leonid Bershidsky warns that Ukraine’s interim government risks triggering a new cascade of violence and economic collapse if it obsesses over taking revenge on the remnants of the Yanukovych regime instead of securing foreign investment.

Finally, if you ever find yourself worrying about the lack of safe streets in Canada, click here and be thankful that the only dangerous things with spots in Canada are teenagers.